Not many fish live-birth, you would need a male to fertilize those eggs. Normally the fertilized eggs are carried on plant matter stuck to ducks, or occasionally the eggs stick to the birds themselves.

Has the situation of any native species ever improved because of the magical market forces? Ever? I can't think of one. Buffalo, beavers, wolves, condors, redwoods, otters, etc. would all be extinct if the top-down management had allowed "actors look out for their own interests". Individual people are myopic short-term actors, only when we band into larger organizations is anything worthwhile ever accomplished.

Carp and suckers are fairly fatty fish, you don't want to fry or bake them really. They're OK grilled, but they're outstanding in a smoker. The fat drips down and burns and everyone in the neighborhood knows that something delicious is about to be available. You may become very popular for an afternoon . . .

They are the same, everywhere in the Universe.

Not even Einstein would have claimed that. We have barely crossed the heliopause, and you can claim that we know that physics works exactly the same everywhere? (I'm assuming you mean physics, because nothing anyone has said would entail numeric systems being invalidated.) Rather arrogant, isn't it? As far as we can tell there are somewhere between 7 and 29 dimensions, of which we have only very limited knowledge of three (four if you consider time a dimension). Try reading 'Flatland' for a hint at how some of those other dimensions might interact with ours.

Nearly everything we see falls neatly in the ranges predicted by scientific theories.

That is at least in part because the ranges predicted by the theories are what we're monitoring. CERN for example automatically discards 99.many-9s of the data generated by their tests without even analyzing it, just because of the sheer volume of data created. For 70%-90% of the mass and energy in the universe we don't even have a way to detect it yet, much less analyze anything more than the galactic-level properties of it.

So the fact that it's just been in the last 20 years that we've realized that we can't even detect 70-90% of all the matter and energy in the universe except at the galactic level doesn't humble you at all? We have it all figured out? Up until a few centuries ago we had 50 millenia of "hard science" showing that the oceans could not be crossed by mariners. Today we have 15 year-old girls who do it single-handed. I hope you like surprises, the future is full of them.

I take it you aren't actually old enough to have been politically aware when Ronnie was president. At one point he publicly "remembered" being in the trenches at Iwo Jima.

I was just going to post the same, except to mention AOpix (haven't used a Morpho system).

I believe it was Arthur Clarke who I heard speculate that we may have already encountered other sentient life and just not recognized it. If something lived so slowly that it took decades or years to form a coherent thought we would never have the patience to talk to it (even if we could figure out how). If something lived so quickly that it was here and gone in a day it wouldn't have the patience to talk to us. For some long-lived species a trip between stars that lasted a thousand years, to us essentially an impossibility, might be the equivalent of an evening parking on Lover's Lane.

One of my favorite mouse-over comments on XKCD goes to the effect of, "There is no logical economic reason to go to the stars. The universe is full of civilizations and species that lived and died on a solitary planet, discovered and recorded by the species which did the illogical thing."

The Anti-Humans-In-Space Nutters seem to have descended in force on this topic. Two centuries ago they would have been busily shouting down anyone who predicted that someday humans would travel faster than 35 miles an hour.

So the Teabaggers should be allowed to violate tax laws because Obama doesn't like them? Interesting concept. They could have registered as any of several other types of non-profit and not had any issues, instead they decided to register as one of the two classes that are NOT allowed to do political campaigning while openly doing just that. This is the exact same issue that got the Moral Majority's tax exempt status revoked at one point. They later re-registered as the correct type of non-profit and had no further issues, except that now they have to reveal their financial patrons.

It's one thing for a test to destroy a few tickytacky houses thrown up in the middle of the desert and burn some mannikins. Actually seeing the devastation is an order of magnitude different. I know from testing that the full-choke barrel on my 16 ga will create a shot pattern a foot wide at a certain distance. Actually seeing the mess it makes of a rabbit that far away is something else entirely.

Mostly because "We're being oppressed by the government!" resonates much better with their base than "We're sleazy douchebags who want to conceal our funding sources but the rules won't let us!"

I suspect that was a bad attempt at sarcasm. He says "Quoting a bad Stallone movie" as though there were some other type of Stallone movie, for example.